Starts in Grassington, heads out towards Kilnsey on the right hand side of the valley and then crosses the valley to go up Mastiles before x country before dropping down in to Geassington. Hard route but one of the nicest runs I’ve done.

My mate was the record holder at 1hr 25 for a few years, only just beaten this year by 30 seconds! Took me 2hr 10 and was my first 1/2

Started training for the Birmingham marathon this very week, got 18 weeks to do a 16 week training plan on the back of effectively zero regular exercise for 18 months – yay! 🙂 Aiming just to get round, hoping five hours is a realistic target – 4 and a half would be nice and theoretically within my ten minute mile reach, but I think that’s too optimistic…

Is 10 minute miles a target based on your current ability or a number plucked out of the air? If you base your training paces on a target that is too fast you can injure yourself or demoralize your self pretty easily.

Better to start off too easy and up the pace over the course of the training plan.

Is 10 minute miles a target based on your current ability or a number plucked out of the air? If you base your training paces on a target that is too fast you can injure yourself or demoralize your self pretty easily.

Better to start off too easy and up the pace over the course of the training plan.

Matt
Hi Matt, it’s the kind of pace I’m running at fairly comfortably on my initial, short runs – the key target for me is to get round, never done more than a 10k before and that was a loooong time ago, so this is uncharted territory for me. Would love to beat four and half, hope to beat five, but I’m not particularly bothered about pace as long as I can roll my porky old bones round before it goes dark. 🙂

Edit to say I hope I pick up a bit of pace between now and then, but I ain’t pushing it. 🙂

10 runs and two and a half weeks into my training, quite enjoying feeling a bit leaner and fitter. 🙂 However, I am still slow – I know I’m not going to magically take two minutes a mile off a comfortable marathon pace, but would it be stupid on, say, a four mile run to do high intensity intervals for the last mile, to try and get a bit quicker? Or will I just break?

IMO you’ll definitely do better if your runs are a bit varied rather than one-paced. Just about all sensible training plans include one long run a week (building up gradually to about 20 miles) and a run with shorter harder-paced efforts, I do workouts like: 5 mins hard(ish) 1 easy x 4-6 reps. Then as much easy running in the rest of the week as you have time and motivation for.

would it be stupid on, say, a four mile run to do high intensity intervals for the last mile, to try and get a bit quicker?

I’d probably aim to do them in the middle bit – a nice warm up, then a bit of speed work, then a warm down. But the general idea of doing some kind of intervals is a good one, mixing it up a bit is good for both speed and motivation.

but would it be stupid on, say, a four mile run to do high intensity intervals for the last mile, to try and get a bit quicker? Or will I just break?

No, stupid would be running 4 miles at the same pace then expecting to race quicker! As above just make sure you have a warm down at the end but pace should be varied. Too many runners are prescriptive about pace. I used to run with some pretty fast guys and our midweek (non Track/hills/long) runs were great fun. I remember doing a 9 mile fartlek session with a particularly good group and we had a measured 800m stretch that we used to use for intervals and I remember clocking sub 2 min 10 secs for the split!! How we laughed!

Thanks folks, happy to hear I might be heading in the right direction. 🙂 Currently do three runs during the week of a shortish but steadily-increasing distance (was 3 miles, now up to 4), then a longer run at the weekends (scheduled for 6 this Sunday, pushing up to twenty over the next 14 weeks or so). I do one of the midweek runs as fast as I can, thought I’d put some intervals into one of the other two – I was only going to do it towards the end of a run as there’s a dam handy, nice and flat with regular columns (about 25 metres) to sprint between. Maybe I’ll have a play tomorrow and see what happens. 🙂